Traditional portable non-volatile storage devices, such as USB storage devices commonly referred to as “thumb drives” or MP3 players, have a single-color light-emitting-diode, which is toggled on and off by an internal controller. This single-color light-emitting-diode gives no differentiation between reading data to, or writing data from, the thumb drive. Furthermore, this LED gives no indication whether the memory is full or whether there is a problem with the thumb drive.